One year ago, U.S. Border Patrol officials discovered a group of 14 dead Mexican migrants in Arizona's desert. Last week, agents found another 16 corpses from Mexico, but this time spread out across Arizona’s scorched expanse. While a Border Patrol spokesman called the deaths “an aberration,” the approximately 2,000 migrant deaths along the U.S.-Mexico boundary since 1995 demonstrate the opposite: such deaths have become a way of life in the border region.

Last year’s Arizona deaths--in what had become by that time a routine response-- elicited official expressions of sorrow as well as outrage directed at professional smugglers. They also gave rise to a renewed effort by the governments of the United States and Mexico to ensure “border safety.” Washington promised increased search and rescue efforts aimed at unauthorized migrants in distress and its Mexican counterparts pledged to block off “high-risk” crossing areas. And, until this most recent spate of deaths, officials would point to a death toll lower than last year’s as a sign of success. But the reduced deaths, as boundary enforcement analysts pointed out, were merely a manifestation of fewer crossings by unauthorized migrants in the context of an economic downturn in the U.S., a trend more recently intensified by the fear and heightened security associated with September 11.

And despite publicity of increased rescue efforts over the last few years, the death toll in proportion to the number of apprehensions of unauthorized immigrants has actually risen. According to the Immigration & Naturalization Service (INS), apprehensions dropped by 25% along the entire U.S-Mexico boundary in fiscal year 2001, but the number of deaths fell by only 11%. And in the INS’s El Centro Sector (which covers the eastern part of California’s border region), there was an increase of 22% in migrant deaths, despite 27% fewer apprehensions during the same period.

Such numbers and the human suffering they embody demonstrate that there is nothing surprising about the deaths. Instead, the fatalities are the inevitable outcome of a lethal political charade--one in which the federal government provides ever greater amounts of boundary enforcement resources in full knowledge that they will not significantly reduce overall levels of unauthorized immigration, but will have increasingly deadly consequences for migrants. A report by the General Accounting Office from last August found “no clear indication” that unauthorized crossings along the Southwest boundary have declined despite the massive infusion of enforcement-related resources since 1994.

INS officials predicted that the “territorial denial” strategies embodied by Operation Gatekeeper in California and similar operations along the boundary would discourage many migrants from crossing into more urbanized zones by pushing them into mountain and desert areas where they would rationally decide to forgo the risks and return home. Their predictions, however, quickly proved hollow. Instead, migrants are relying increasingly on costly smugglers and taking greater risks. As a result, countless migrants are still successfully beating the enforcement web. But many more than before are also dying.

Myriad reasons--ranging from grinding poverty at home to the profound socio-economic ties and growing inequality between the United States and its southern neighbors--explain why unauthorized migrants continue to traverse the U.S-Mexico boundary. At the same time, American capital’s voracious appetite for highly exploitable labor attracts “illegal” migrants, whose presence is widely accepted at the highest levels of society. Meanwhile, the liberalization of national economies such as Mexico's has predictably intensified migratory pressures among those displaced in the name of economic efficiency.

Such factors, combined with the will of unauthorized migrants to pursue their basic human rights to work, to maintain their families, and to have an adequate standard of living, make unauthorized immigration inevitable. The Bush administration’s proposed increase of $1.2 billion for the INS enforcement budget will do nothing to change this. To pretend and behave otherwise is to effectively sentence hundreds of migrants to death each year.

The so-called illegals are not outlaws. They are human beings and, frequently, our neighbors and people with whom we regularly interact in our daily lives. Only by recognizing the reality of a society that transcends our national boundaries, and the human right of all people to freedom of movement, work and residence, and by ending boundary enforcement as it relates to migrants can we stop the deaths.

How many more will have to die before we do so?

Joseph Nevins is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of California Berkeley. He is the author of Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the 'Illegal Alien' and the Making of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary (Routledge).

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